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by joel_perl_prog 4415 days ago
What a great genius. What a great loss.

Celebrate his life today by watching Alien!

1 comments

Good idea, but [ SPOILER ALERT!! ] remember to watch the original version, the one where you don’t see the alien till the last minute of the movie.
Lol. Sure. I used to have the special edition DVD...before I let go of all my DVDs. I would just say: don't worry about that. Just soak in the beautiful ambience of a film which features prominently the art of Giger, both in set design, and creature design!
You might want to add a spoiler alert at the beginning of your comment. I'm sure most of HN has already seen the movie but for those who haven't, knowing that can ruin the suspense.
[Spoiler?] If the movie is called "Alien", is it really a spoiler to say that you see the alien by the end? I suspect that most of the movie is spent dreading the eventuality that we all expect. ;) Granted it's been a long time since I saw the movie, so I might have forgotten why it's a spoiler.

edit: I suspect that I saw Aliens before Alien, and therefore already had an expectation of what it would look like. Thanks to the sibling/cousin comments for explaining that :)

Oooops!
[SPOILERS] I'm not sure which I've seen.. in the non-original, when do you first see the alien, in the airducts?
[SPOILERS] Yes, just at the end, so the thing you’ve been imaging in your mind for the whole movie is completely destroyed by the shape of a human being. All that monstrosity that gives life to a human-like. And that happens in the exact moment a human-like animal kills it expelling it into space from the ship. Genius.

Edit: whoops, I didn’t read your comment correctly. I don’t remember where you see its full shape, the airducts is the most plausible place as far as I remember.

> watch the original version

You mean there is another version where you see it earlier? Whose stupid idea was that?

As far as I remember the director’s cut has a lot of glimpses to it way before [ SPOILER ALERT!! ] the xenomorph get spit out of the ship.
For the record, I like Ridley Scott's cuts. I guess I'm specifically alluding to Blade Runner here, as another example.

Second note: I'm noticing already other comments focusing on how much knowledge we have outside of Alien, almost like punk rock posturing. It's okay to like something that's popular and beautiful! Watch Alien! This is not an underground punk band guys, a great genius has just died. =)

Speaking of punk rock, Mr. Giger can claim some significant cultural influence in that sphere too.

Klaus Flouride, the bassist for the Dead Kennedys had mentioned in an interview from 2003 that personal differences between band members, regarding the "Work 219: Landscape XX (penis landscape)" painting, were the breaking point determining the band's breakup:

  ...the Frankenchrist thing was, say, a final straw as far 
  as [Jello Biafra] going in a different direction than what 
  we wanted to do. I felt that the poster itself was shock 
  for the sake of shock value. We'd shocked people before, 
  but we'd always tried to have a point behind it. I didn't 
  see the point he was making. But we didn't quit after the 
  lawsuit happened. We quit when he decided that that poster 
  was gonna be in there one way or the other, and we could 
  take a hike if we wanted to. So we said, "Well, why don't 
  we call it 'Jello Biafra and Dead Kennedys?,'" since 
  that's what it was becoming anyway at that point. [1]
[1] http://www.markprindle.com/flouride-i.htm

And then...

  The poster was printed and inserted in the Frankenchrist 
  album with an additional sticker on the outside 
  shrinkwrap, warning buyers of the contents. The resulting 
  trial for obscenity nearly drove the label into 
  bankruptcy. [2]

  The artwork caused a furor with the newly formed Parents 
  Music Resource Center (PMRC). In December 1985 a teenage 
  girl purchased the album at the Wherehouse Records store 
  in Los Angeles County. The girl's mother wrote letters of 
  complaint to the California Attorney General and to Los 
  Angeles prosecutors. In 1986 members of the band, along 
  with other parties involved in the distribution of 
  Frankenchrist, were charged criminally with distribution 
  of harmful matter to minors. [3]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_Landscape

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Kennedys#Frankenchrist_an...

  ...it provoked a legal offensive against the band 
  beginning in April 1986. As well as having his flat torn 
  apart by the police, Biafra was charged with "distributing 
  harmful matter to minors," a charge which he repulsed on 
  the basis of the First Amendment right to free speech and 
  which was dismissed the following year. [4]
[4] http://www.deadkennedys.com/history.html

But there were lots of album covers, and not everybody who chose Giger's work stirred up quite the same shitstorm as the Dead Kennedys.

Some of the other album covers Giger's artwork has graced, include the likes of Glenn Danzig, Debbie Harry, Carcass and Celtic Frost.

It also has an entire repeated sequence, which is very strange.